JOANNE TOD'S
ELOQUENT ENIGMAS

Let me take you for a stroll through the art gallery of McLuhan
Studies. Our opening exhibition features black and white reproductions
of Joanne Tod's works.

A Pictorial

Gallery of

Nine Images

Contemporary art is rooted in the resonant interval between two different cultures, the old and the new (the modern and, for lack of a better term, the postmodern), media grounded respectively in typography and electronics. In or time, artists have an acute sense of cultural transformation, constantly placing themselves in a precarious balance between the wheel of one culture and the axle of the other. This "law of two" is the result of our still tame sense of the future rubbing with our melancholic
attachment to the culture that we know better, the culture that gave us our background, our education, our certainties, our past. We look back for comfort as we confront what is now leaping out of our collective mythical warehouse.

The permanence of this unstable, hybrid condition, however, fosters a new sense of awareness and identity. We have been caught in this epochal interface for over a century now, and we have nothing
more to gain from the linear coherence of dialectical thinking (i.e., the bold doctrines associated with French-style linguistics: rigorous structuralism, mechanical semiotics, Americanized Marxism...
all flat on their back, with their "new" and "post" theories unable to rejuvenate a doomed mode of thinking, totally ineffective to explain the challenging reality-virtual, untamable-of
the day).

Our hybrid reality lets us look back at our present environment as already "historical." We can see with detachment our first steps in what appears to be the right direction as we
hurdle the new rhetoric and new cultural languages. We have rejected the old masters of perennial idealism and erected altars to new gods of self expression and autonomy of artistic discourse, from
Kafka to Joyce, from Gauguin to Cézanne, from Duchamp to the Italian Futurists. There is a certain sense of accomplishment, and perhaps consolation, in recognizing intimately the new mythical
dimension of their visions. But our world is not theirs: the constructs of their imagination is our reality, and what we see as nature still begs to be understood. Nature is not what it used to be.
McLuhan explains:

At the speed of light, minus the physical body, man is discarnate and discarnate man is not related to natural law. (1985, 99)

It is pretty clear now that the virtuality (i.e., discarnation) of our reality, induced by electronic media, is no metaphor. But our old sense of direction fails us: we need the artists to chart the present landscape. Healing from the "rear-view mirror syndrome" we "understand the future by looking at the present" or, to use yet another of McLuhan's explicit paradoxes, we begin to realize that "the future is a thing of the past." Electric speed means past and future now coexist. Chronology is as obsolete as distance: the present consists of continuous recycling. Applied ecology is not a fad, it's a necessary strategy for survival.

We sense all this as Joanne Tod enhances and clarifies our vision on both the unbroken vigor of the "law of two" and the puzzling innovative ecology of iconic retrieval.

Let us begin with an early piece, In the Kitchen (1975), already overflowing with cultural elements of our present-future cultural condition.

Where does this image come from? Or, indeed, since we are right at the beginning (of the review as well as the artist's career), where does she get her images? Joanne Tod's iconic reservoir is "the whole mass-cultural bundle" (Mays, 1985): a heap of diversified material (women' and men's magazines, books, movies, TV, ads... the works) ranging from the most innocent and nostalgic silk-gowned mannequins to the crudest contortions of naked bodies.

The sense of this cut-and-paste operation is connected to Tod's realism: not a simple representation but a re-representation which makes it both perspicuous and problematic in terms of cultural ecology. There is an obvious link with the entire pop art experience, but in Tod's work there is a more dramatic gap between the image and its new depiction (a dynamic gap that will explode in the multilayered conceptualization of Where am I? presented below). Tod charged the photograph that inspired In the Kitchen, taken from a Japanese bondage magazine, with a totally new intellectual stratification:

She appropriates imagery. If it started as someone else's too bad. Now it's hers. (Hume, Jan. 1993)

Tod's works often temper an element of violence by genial strokes of mordant irony, especially in the titles. This combination informs a fin de siècle artistic experience that Robert Morgan aptly defines as "psychodrama" (1993). The psychodrama In the Kitchen erupts from multiple voices and differences. Assumptions, stereotypes and clichés ("the place of the woman is in the kitchen," "the kitchen is the most used room in the house," "people hang plants in the kitchen," and the like) are questioned and reduced to the conceptual tension of the "law of two": domestic comfort vs violence, everyday life vs acrobatic sex (the padding around the woman's ankles indicates an erotic game), East vs West (we are Western spectators of an Asian scene; notice the steam rice maker on the counter).

The East-West resonating cultural interval that captured the imagination of some of the best minds of the century, from Joyce to Pound, from Kerouac to Brautigan, is front and center in this disquieting triangular composition. The title and the two figures at the bottom make me think of Piero della Francesca flipped angels decorating his Madonna del Parto, perhaps an unintentional but not less powerful antithesis, or visual pun on the central figure. Tod's modern madonna, naked, hanging helplessly from a meat hook,and lit by a bare light bulb in a dungeon more psychological than real cannot be viewed with static indifference or, worse, with complacent detachment. Our participation is demanded, and indeed imposed, by the angelic smiles of the two young women looking at us: a mannerist trait which, together with the "decoration" of the title, reminds us that this is a picture, to be read pictoriallly. The artist guides the dance of our eyes as we explore the composition: the triangular structure, accentuated by the strong diagonal line on the right draws us from the atrocity at the centre to the bottom, where we encounter, whichever angle we take, the enigmatic serenity of the smile. The eloquence of the picture is in the intensity of the gap.

Displaced identity is a major function of Joanne Tod's psychodramas.Wyndham Lewis offers this insight into the "law of two":

There is nothing so impressive as the number TWO.
You must be a duet in everything.
For the Individual, the single object, and isolated, is, you must admit, an absurdity.
Why try and give the impression of a consistent and indivisible personality. (From McLuhan, 1971, From Cliché to Archetype161)

As you might guess, Joanne Tod does not look at all like the figure of the Self Portrait. The painting is about the process of iconic projection. The gap between the two persons, subject and object, is provided by the informal writing at the bottom, where we learn that a certain "Russell" drives a blue Japanese car (in passing: the Orient is here as well), and that
she considers essential for us to know that painting is her work, part of her individual life:

She's smart enough to keep something for herself; there is a part of every painting to which only her own private painterly considerations are admitted. (Hume, Oct. 1993)

The obelisk and the column which frame the central figure (we know how the artist values decoration) give a vertical dimension to the composition, recalled and enhanced by the long neck of the woman and by the strong artificial lighting that bleaches her face: high society vs a subcompact Japanese import. The revealing gap, then, is in the informality of the written message in striking contrast with the official space (Capitol Hill in Washington DC, we infer) and the theatrical pose of an
elegantly dressed woman wearing her patrician smile.

This is a striking piece of social commentary, self referentiality, and development of iconic discourse. All the elements of the previous painting remain, but the "external" verticality of ironic
neoplatonism has been incorporated and flattened by the "internal" normality of the dining room set. Narratively, the phallic plutocracy of Capitol Hill, with its columns and olelisks, has acquired the Self Portraint, "a collector's item" (cf. McLuhan: "When a thing is current, it creates currency"), and neutralized its social criticism by offering the object
for dinner consummation. Quoting the previous painting makes it an archetype in a new context that also makes the painter a cliché. The viewer is made aware of the transforming power of the image and of the collage of styles. Adding the title (we know the figure is not Tod) pushes the paradox of the whole composition to a new plateau of contemplation. And the artist? What happened to her
in the process? Again, the gap: she is "in the picture"-in the painting as in the commercial transaction-and out of it.

This puzzling composition is again played on the psychological game of subject identification. The four circular "windows" on the upper right side show a viewer behind the picture in a
five-to-twelve position. Twelve o'clock, noon, high noon... the time of transformation is only five minutes away. "I'm a big fan of the penultimate," the artist once said (Taylor, 1992). The position of the viewer in the painting suggests that the revelation will come through the object represented,
but given its perfect symmetry, the object will look exactly the same behind as from the front. This psychological short-circuit makes us look inward to our own process of image projection.
A final twist: the bottom window shows that the hidden viewer is black. Again, then, the issue of race, with all its assumptions and clichés.

A striking illustration of the functionality of beauty is offered by this majestic painting (measuring 96"x132") where the title emphasizes the dramatic appearance of the young woman
in purple velvet; at the same time, the title recalls the stereotypes associated with "coloured women." The title is also a literal description, since the woman is painted in color, while
the second layer of the painting is in black and white. The figure at the centre depicts a worker that the AGO laid off. "I think the gallery needs more female energy," says Tod (cf.Hume, Oct 1993).

If the logic seems to be, "you are what you wear," get ready for an intensification of the identity puzzle, which is here presented by the two painted bodies (reminiscent of a vogue of the turbulent Sixties), and by the totally naked woman at the centre. The complexity of the image is due to the juxtaposition of unrelated elements: notice the flirtation of the porcelain feet with those of the "women of flesh." The piece is crowded with artifacts reacting to the nakedness of the female body. The result is a multitude of impressions accelerated by the swirling "neobaroque" composition.

The other is not oriental or black here, but Muslim, not an individual, but a "mass." The collective spiritual energy evoked by the communal prayer materializes in the gigantic
ball suspended in mid-air. The stars of David, "decorating" the piece with its sharp angles are an obvious element of contrast. But this is only the surface of the gap: deep down there is the
annihilation of private identity and the resurfacing of corporate bonding announced by McLuhan as an epocal, disquieting effect of electronic media.

The piece shows a Gibson guitar, a pop culture icon. The title (a common expression from electronic technology) and the visual play on the guitar neck, protruding out of the picture on one
side and reappearing on the other (are there two instruments?) suggest continuity and circularity (i.e., retrieval) of the pop music experience. The plain, single object here, with no distracting
elements, made me think of Murray Favro's unforgetable guitar "sculptures." Favro concentrated on extracting new and ideal forms from the object; Tod re-presents the object as is/was.
I see this operation as distilling the retrieval process: no more irony but sheer actualization of the object retrieved. This iconic guitar seems to me a transition towards a new phase of Tod's pictorial
discourse, and towards a new imagery. And just as in In the Kitchen at the beginning, On Line (with the three other guitar pieces not shown here), I believe, will spawn a revealing
series of insights into our present-future electronic environment.

Works Cited

Hume, Christopher. "Artist Joanne Tod has energy to burn
and talent to match." The Toronto Star, January 10,
1993.

__________. "Beauty shines through all Tod's layers."
The Toronto Star, October 7, 1993.